


Not Without You

by lurkingspecter



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Bad Ending, Everyone is Dead, John tries to have it both ways and fails, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-10 20:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12919998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkingspecter/pseuds/lurkingspecter
Summary: The crew doesn’t make it out before the Hunger arrives. John finally gets everything he wanted, but something is missing.





	Not Without You

John was surprised when he realized what had happened; after years of failure he was beginning to think that he would never catch them.

He sent for Merle.

Something Merle-shaped congealed out of the sludge dripping from the ceiling of his makeshift parley room. John tried to read his expression, to see how he felt about this, but his features were too indistinct now.

“It’s good to finally have you on board,” he said. “Take a seat.”

Merle didn’t move.

“I can understand why you’re upset, but being stubborn won’t do you any good at this point.”

Merle bared his teeth and snarled. John learned forward, frowning.

“Merle?”

The creature in front of him didn’t appear to recognize the name. John stood up and approached him. Merle was radiating heat like a furnace.

John put his hand on Merle’s head and cracks of black opal formed on his skin. He let it spread up to his elbow and then shoved his hand into Merle’s head, letting the Hunger in his body mix with the substance that made up Merle. His fingers curled in the space where Merle’s brain would have been.

A rush of emotions hit him: Merle’s anger that his family of seven had to keep dying, his frustration with John’s stubbornness, the despair that he felt every cycle but tried to hide. His exhaustion. His worry. Negative, negative, negative. There was none of Merle’s joy, his humor, his patience.

John retracted his hand. The black opal faded. Merle kept radiating heat and fury.

But this wasn’t Merle.

John looked up at the white eyes watching them.

“I asked you to send me Merle.”

John dismissed the thing in front of him, and it melted into the floor.

“ _Where is he?_ ”

*

John spread his awareness out through the Hunger, taking it a piece at a time. Being aware of all of it at once was too difficult. It was better to nudge it in the direction that he wanted it to go instead of trying to control it directly.

Merle was nowhere to be found.

He missed him. He missed his infuriating optimism. It had been nice to debate with him, even though they could never agree—especially because they could never agree. It had kept him sharp. The Hunger’s quickening in recent years had been in part due to the competitive urge that he got from his conversations with Merle.

Over the years he had honed many of the Hunger’s abilities, but the ability to recall individual personalities wasn’t one of them. Their personality got redistributed along with the rest of their matter. The Hunger had broken Merle into pieces and scattered him—but if he was broken then it followed that he would be able to fix him, right?

For the most part, the Hunger smothered any positive emotions that it absorbed, but there were still traces of them. John found bits of the traits that seemed to make Merle who he was, and put them into the Merle-shaped thing that he had summoned before. The figure’s posture relaxed. He smiled. This time, when John asked him to take a seat, he obeyed.

“Do you know who you are?” said John.

The figure said nothing.

“Can you understand me?”

The figure stared straight ahead, glassy-eyed, its smile rigid and fake.

*

John tried adding every emotion and personality trait that he could find. Nothing worked. In fact, the more that he mixed in the blander Merle became. He never responded to John unless he ordered him to do something.

The Hunger let him indulge in these experiments after every plane they took. Talking with Merle had helped him before, so why stop now? It was good for their leader to have a hobby, evidently.

After fifty years of trying, though, he grew tired of it.

He summoned Merle more and more rarely. He didn’t try to talk with him now. He sat slumped in his chair, twirling a chess piece and gazing at him silently.

He had felt sad before, but he wasn’t sure what he felt now. Empty. Getting emptier.

There finally came a day when he knew that he would never try again.

“I always thought that you would be by my side at the end. I wanted you to see what we became, and finally understand what all of this is about.”

John’s fingers tightened around the pawn in his hand.

“I didn’t want _this_.”

He wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince. The eyes on the wall remained indifferent. The figure waiting obediently in front of him didn’t seem to care whether his destruction had been intentional or not.

There was nothing to do but get on with things.

He held out his hand and Merle crumbled to ashes for the final time.

Maybe he would forget about him in a couple thousand years.


End file.
